Resources Database

Child Protection Professionals (CPPs) play a key role in providing insights into the child protection system and how it can best support children’s right to personal security, particularly during trying times like the COVID-19 pandemic. Qualitative research provides one potential tool to tap into this knowledge and awareness. This research thus expanded earlier qualitative work on CPPs’ perceptions of the impact of COVID-19 on their work, including potential struggles and barriers, into the context of a developing country.

The responsibility of local authorities in England to provide children in care with stable, local placements has become increasingly difficult due to the rising number of children in need of care and a shortage of available placements. It is unclear if the trend of outsourcing children's social care to private companies has exacerbated this challenge. This paper examines how the outsourcing of children's social care to the private market has influenced placement locality and long-term stability over time.

While Changing the Way We Care has focused on systems change since the beginning, it was not always underpinned by a conceptual framework. Even without applying the scaling conceptual framework developed, Changing the Way We Care has found that focusing on systems strengthening alone has helped drive scale-up.

The examples in this Insights Learning Brief describe how systems strengthening alone can lead to scaling of interventions, including interventions that already exist.

School social workers are integral to the school mental health workforce and the leading social service providers in educational settings. In recent decades, school social work practice has been largely influenced by the multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) approach, ecological systems views, and the promotion of evidence-based practice. However, none of the existing school social work reviews have examined the latest characteristics and outcomes of school social work services.

This article sets out key issues in determining and upholding the best interests of children, in need of social service support, who have family networks that span outside of the UK. These issues are then analysed against whether and how child protection professionals take these into account along with an overall consideration of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child’s (UNCRC) ‘best interests of the child’, when assessing and planning for those needs in kinship care cases.

This special issue of the British Journal of Social Work sought to attract academic papers of the same quality and integrity as those published regularly in the journal, the key differentiation being that a person with lived experience of social work had to be the lead or solo author. Areas covered by the articles in this issue include contemporary social work concerns such as mental health, the effect of the pandemic on carers, institutional care, perspectives on autism, a critique of life story work, communication between parents and children in out-of-home care and insights into people w

This brief, from the U.S. Child Welfare Information Gateway, explores what the research shows about the overlap among families experiencing poverty and those reported to the child welfare system for neglect, the societal context within which both poverty and neglect exist, and strategies that have proven effective for preventing and addressing both poverty and neglect, together.

This resource, from the U.S. Center for States' Childwelfare Capacity Building Program, provides information on how to partner with young people to discuss redesigning the child welfare service array to meet the needs of youth and young adults currently and formerly in foster care, focusing on topics such as housing, healthcare and mental health, substance use disorder treatment, and education. Each section of this publication discusses: 

Let’s Talk Social Work Podcast examined the U.K. Government’s strategy for children’s social care in England, Stable Homes Built on Love, and kinship care. Andy McClenaghan is joined by kinship carer, Natalie Boyes, Sam Turner, Head of Policy and Public Affairs at the charity Kinship, and Dr Paul Shuttleworth, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Education and Social Work at Sussex University.

This paper proposes a framework for comprehensive, collaborative, and community-based care (C4) for accessible mental health services in low-resource settings. Because mental health conditions have many causes, this framework includes social, public health, wellness and clinical services. It accommodates integration of stand-alone mental health programs with health and non-health community-based services.

This webinar, from the U.S. Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development (QIC-WD), provided a general framework for what research says about best practices in onboarding, provide examples from our work with various jurisdictions to support supervisors who work with new workers, and evidence-informed strategies to make new workers feel like they are part of something bigger.

Green social work (GSW) is a nascent framework within the social work field that provides insights regarding social workers’ engagement in disaster settings. Although this framework has recently garnered more attention, it remains under-researched and underdeveloped within the context of social work research, education, and practice in Canada and internationally.

Child maltreatment is a global public health problem that can have detrimental and long-lasting effects on children’s development and health. It occurs most frequently at the hands of parents and caregivers. These guidelines provide evidence-based recommendations on interventions for parents and caregivers of children aged 0–17 years that are designed to reduce child maltreatment and harsh parenting, enhance the parent–child relationship, and prevent poor parent mental health and child emotional and behavioral problems.

Turnover rates in the child welfare workforce have been a serious concern for decades. Despite consistent research on the causes of and remedies for turnover, the rate remains too high. How turnover directly impacts children and families continues to be a gap in the research and literature. Additionally, the voices of the communities directly impacted by turnover in the child welfare workforce are often overlooked. Despite these gaps, this brief gathers several resources that look at turnover from the perspectives of families, children, workers, agencies, and other impacted groups.

The 2023 Social Work Day at the United Nations in New York aimed to further the understanding of disability issues in human rights and developmental contexts. It highlighted a full spectrum of this discourse, tackling theoretical aspects and down-to-earth issues encountered by practitioners and policymakers. The presentations on promoting enabling environments identified ways in which socially discriminatory barriers can be reduced or eliminated.

This case study details how IZU Elisa supported a child-headed household in Kayonza district, Rwanda.

The IZU programme was initiated in 2016 as an innovative approach to decentralising the child protection workforce to community-level, and the cadre now comprises the frontline of Rwanda’s child protection system. 

This case study details,how IZU Emmanuel and Genevieve supported a young person living with disabilities in Kamonyi district, Rwanda.

The IZU programme was initiated in 2016 as an innovative approach to decentralising the child protection workforce to community-level, and the cadre now comprises the frontline of Rwanda’s child protection system. 

This case study details how IZU Immaculee and Naphtal help Laura to escape child labour and abuse in Musanze, Rwanda.

The IZU programme was initiated in 2016 as an innovative approach to decentralising the child protection workforce to community-level, and the cadre now comprises the frontline of Rwanda’s child protection system.